We choose ... to train the next generation of innovators in trauma care
The graduation in November 2024 of four students from a fledgling Tanzanian master’s degree program may not have made big headlines. But it marked a significant milestone in DGHI’s long-standing partnerships in the East African country — one that may become a model for sustaining equitable global collaborations in the years ahead.
The graduates — medical doctors Alice Andongolile, Rosalia Njau, William Nkenguye and Edwin Shewiyo — were the first to complete the Trauma Research Capacity Building in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania (TRECK) program, which teaches research skills to Tanzanian students interested in injury prevention and trauma care. The brainchild of DGHI associate professor and GEMINI Center director Catherine Staton, M.D., and Blandina Mmbaga, M.D., a pediatrician and director of research at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC) in Moshi, Tanzania, TRECK is the first DGHI-supported training program led entirely by Tanzanian researchers, with Mmbaga serving as its principal investigator.
Moshi, Tanzania
Mmbaga’s leadership of TRECK reflects the maturity of DGHI’s partnership with KCMC, which over the past two decades has funded more than 85 training positions for researchers in specialties such as infectious diseases, maternal health, mental health and cancer. The transition is also opportune: Because Mmbaga heads the National Institutes of Health grant that supports the training program, it has not been endangered by NIH’s new policies that restrict funds from going to foreign subcontractors.
Meanwhile, TRECK’s trainees are thriving. Students have presented research at international conferences, calling for new interventions to help fast-urbanizing countries such as Tanzania deal with a growing number of road accidents and injuries. Two of TRECK’s inaugural graduates, Shewiyo and Njau, wrote a research grant for a KCMC team studying ways to improve care for older trauma patients that was recently funded by NIH, also a first for the program.
Mmbaga has been pleased to see those first graduates stepping up as mentors for TRECK’s second and third cohorts, which will graduate in fall 2025. “You see the maturity and growth into research,” says Mmbaga, who is also an adjunct associate professor with DGHI. “We are building the scientists of the future.”
To read more about TRECK and its first graduating class, see this DGHI story from December 2024.
